Sunday, June 17, 2007
The Vast and Messy Neocon Experiment in Iraq and the Middle East
"We
shall have no peace as long as the whole territory of the Land of Israel will
not return under Jewish control.... A stable peace will come only then, when
Israel will return to itself all its historical lands, and will thus control
both the Suez and the Ormudz channel.... We must remember that Iraqi oil fields
too are located on the Jewish land."
Avrom
Shmulevic, rabbi and historian
"[American
] strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s
regime from power."..[His removal is
absolutely vital to] "the security of the world in the first part of
the 21st century" and for "the safety of American troops in the
region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and
a significant portion of the world's supply of oil."
Neocons'
January 26, 1998 letter to President Bill Clinton
"Israel made a large contribution to the
decision to embark on this [Iraq]
war. I know that on the eve of the war, [Ariel] Sharon said, in a closed conversation with senators, that if
they could succeed in getting rid of Saddam Hussein, it would solve Israel's
security problems."
Robert (Bob) Novak,
American veteran reporter
“We do know, with absolute certainty, that he [Saddam
Hussein] is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs
in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon.”
Vice President Dick Cheney, September 2002
Like apprentice sorcerers, a group of
pro-Israel Neocons,
took hold of U.S. foreign policy under President George W. Bush and designed
the most wicked and the most improvised war of aggression by any country
against another that one can remember. This small group of ideologues, lacking
in judgment, knowledge and wisdom but full of fanaticism, arrogance and hubris
seized upon a double opportunity to advance their narrow interests at the
expense of the American people, the Iraqi people and world peace and order.
Their first opportunity came when an inept and an inexperienced
politician was barely elected president of the United States in November 2000,
Texas Governor George W. Bush.
Clustered around Vice President Dick Cheney and around then Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld, they successfully established a parallel government
within the Bush-Cheney administration, de facto independent of
the Office of the National Security Advisor (Condoleezza Rice), of the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) (George Tenet) and
of the State Department (Colin Powell).
The leading warmongering Neocons were Cheney's Chief of
staff, Lewis 'Scooter' Libby (recently convicted of
perjury) and Cheney's Middle East advisor, David Wurmser, plus the top
decision makers at the Pentagon, Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Under
Secretary Douglas Feith, assisted by the head of the Defense
Policy Board, Richard Perle and by Elliott
Abrams, head of the Middle East policy at the National Security Council. On the
ground in Iraq, they later could count on an advisor and protégé of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and a director of Kissinger Associates, L. Paul (Jerry) Bremer, whose
fateful decisions involved dismantling the entire Iraqi government and firing
the heavily armed 400,000 strong Iraqi army. —This small group of
insiders was supported by a host of outside lobbies, by
an army of sycophants in Washington pro-Israel think
tanks and by far-right journalists and media at
large.
The second opportunity arose with the September 11,
2001 terrorist attacks that traumatized the American people and made them
vulnerable to manipulation, deception
forgery and lies, and any other tactics used to justify
an illegal war of aggression against Iraq.
The Neocon plan for the Middle East was initially
crafted in Israel, in 1996, by a group of advisors to then-Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, of the Likud Party. These advisors were Richard
Perle, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks Jr., Douglas Feith, Robert Loewenberg,
David Wurmser, and Meyrav Wurmser, all of them directing or collaborating with the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political
Studies (IASPS),
a
think tank headquartered in
Jerusalem, with a Washington office, and supported by the Scaife Foundation and the Bradley Foundation. —It is to be
noted also that many of these individuals later found their way to the
highest echelons of the Bush-Cheney administration. Their Israeli policy plan for
the Middle East entitled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm",
was published by IASPS, and it called for a grand strategy of total war in
the Middle East, using the military power of the United States to do the job.
Iraq became the testing ground for the Neocons' grand
plan. The Neocons viewed Iraq as an immediate threat to Israel, and in the long
term, they dreamed of overthrowing the ruling Iraqi Baath Party in order to
transform the entire Middle East in Israel's favor. Indeed, Saddam
Hussein got into the Neocons's sight even before he took three annoying
decisions in the early 2000s.
First, Iraq announced in September 2000, in the middle
of the U.S. presidential election, that from then on, it would demand to be paid in euros
instead of dollars for its oil exports. Second, Saddam Hussein began rewarding
the families of suicide bombers in Israel with a compensation of $25,000, a
move that enraged the Israeli government and its allies within the U.S.
government. And third, in a move that deeply shook up oilmen Bush II and
Cheney, he announced on April 8, 2002, that Iraq would suspend its oil exports for one month, as a protest against the slow pace
toward settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and against Israel's
refusal to cease its illegal occupation of the Palestinian
territories.
The Oil-Israel nexus is at the core of the motivations
for Bush-Cheney's fateful decisions to launch an illegal war against Iraq on
March 20, 2003. Maintaining U.S. control over Middle
East oil and shoring up the state of Israel are the two fundamental and
interrelated rationales for involving American military might in a string of wars in the Middle East. —Last November 1, (2006) President George W.
Bush finally all but confessed that the U.S. must maintain occupying troops
(indefinitely) in the Middle East to keep the flow of oil coming,
because (if we leave) "extremists [may]
be in a position to use oil as a tool to blackmail the West... and they will do so unless we abandon Israel ". He has also said in the past that the U.S. is
committed to defending Israel, no
matter what. Thus, in Bush's own words, the invasion of Iraq was a 'preventive
aggression' to grab Iraqi oil, turn Iraq into an oil colony and support anything
Israel does to the Palestinians!
In my book 'The New American Empire', 'Oil
and Israel' were precisely the two main reasons I identified for the U.S.
invading a Middle East country that had not attacked the United States; it had
nothing to do with the hogwash of 'weapons of mass destruction', 'al Qaeda',
the 'war on terror' or 'democracy'. It had everything to do with oil and Israel
and the power of such related interests within the American political system.
What Bush was echoing in his declaration
is that grand plan designed by pro-Israel neocon ideologues within and outside
the Bush-Cheney administration to reshape the entire Middle East region to fit
American oil interests and Israel's strategic interests. —Unfortunately,
this is a flawed and illegal plan that was crafted and implemented in a climate
of arrogance, amateurishness, stupidity and incompetence on a high scale. The gruesome and messy results
are all there to be seen by everyone with eyes to see.
The great scandal is that much of the raw
truth about the Iraq War has been hidden from the vast majority of Americans.
Maybe a paper like the New York Times should publish this article to compensate for all the falsehoods it
published on its front page during the months that preceded the war.
________________________________________
Rodrigue
Tremblay lives in Montreal and can be reached at rodrigue.tremblay@yahoo.com
Visit
his blog site at: www.thenewamericanempire.com/blog.
Author's
Website: www.thenewamericanempire.com/
Check
Dr. Tremblay's coming book "The Code for Global Ethics"
at: www.TheCodeForGlobalEthics.com/_______________________________
Posted,
Sunday June 17, 2007, at 5:30 am
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